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“In the feminine model of planning, we have to be willing to trust our hearts and guts and intuitions and future selves and make a plan to fulfill what they are dishing out.” –Mia
Many of the women that we work with don’t love the idea of being a planner.
They want freedom — and a plan feels like the opposite.
I get it.
Here are a few truths about me:
I didn’t want the structure of a plan, but I started listening to stories of very successful women, who worked 3 days making plenty of money, were great mothers, frequented yoga, traveled… all the things. And I realized that they made a choice and charted a course.
Planning — even for people who don’t like to plan — shifts when we shift how we plan. We need to stop putting together a puzzle of all the things we are “supposed” to do when we plan.
When we start weaving a tapestry of what matters most, planning becomes a creative process.
When we get creative and focused on what matters, we’re more likely to keep showing up for planning. When planning this way becomes a practice, eventually our days are composed only of what really matters to us and our destiny.
My favorite definition of planning is this: Planning is just making choices in advance.
When I say that to FLOW members or our audience, women heave a big sigh of relief or give a huge AHA!
Women are often more willing to be a planner when they shift how they think about planning.
If you’ve pushed back against planning, you are probably thinking a lot about masculine models of planning.
First let me clarify, when I talk about masculine and feminine planning, I’m talking about energy, not gender.
The way we plan and make choices as a society is very masculine, and the negative side of that is that planning has largely been about how much we can do. This is why “busy” became a badge of honor, even though it leads to burnout, stress, sickness, and other issues.
That isn’t to say masculine energy in planning is all bad. The problem is the feminine is squeezed out completely.
We need a balance of masculine and feminine energy to make a good plan. Since we are so entrenched in a masculine model, I think most of us need to dive deeper into the feminine.
When we bring the feminine in, the planning process becomes that tapestry of the life we want.
I drew heavily on feminine energy in creating the FLOW Planning Method, a new way of planning (and yes, it works for non-planners). Let’s take a look.
Center
The first step is to center. We want to make choices from the inside out, so we want to be as centered and grounded as possible when it’s time to make those choices. When we are centered, we can make choices that truly honor our future self.
Vision
From Center we Vision. We create a picture and feel the result we want as if we’ve done it. We shift our identities in advance and make the change energetically before we make it physically.
Center and vision together can take as little as 2 minutes, though sometimes we give more time for bigger decisions or longer term plans.)
Decide
With our vision set, it’s time to Decide. When we are deciding how we will spend our time, we often default to what everyone else is doing and what we’ve done before. But if we’ve taken the time with Center and Vision, we can access a new way that sees a clearer next step that is completely aligned with our future self.
At this point, our decisions or “knowings” feel so right. That does not mean that 5 minutes later we won’t doubt ourselves. Often a “who am I?” or “this feels too hard” will show up. A good plan helps us face our limintig beliefs in new ways.
Part of the Decision step brings in feminine trust/faith and matches it with the masculine quality of breaking things down and organizing them. We get things out of our head and on paper (or into a doc) quickly, then we organize them — sometimes into teeny tiny steps, sometimes into bunches of like things, always prioritizing 3 things that feel true at the soul level and letting the rest fall into place around.
Anchor
So much shifts when we make decisions a little differently. By this state in the process, we have prioritized things in a more aligned way, but we still have a glorified to-do list. We will quickly get overwhelmed about our new idea or way of being, because the part of us that KNOWS we can do it does not understand time. We need to Anchor what we’ve said yes to in time. We do this differently for different things. Some people like knowing that they have a morning where they have cleared the space for creativity. Others may have something that needs more specificity — 30 minutes of food shopping, 30 minutes getting organized in the kitchen, and an hour of meal prep. The key is to anchor all the important things.
Follow through
When we have gone through the four steps above, follow through shifts, because there is a combo of focus, time bending, and momentum that creates a different result. I’ve found that even people who say they aren’t good at follow through, become finishers when they’ve done the rest of the process.
There are different ways to apply these steps depending on what you are doing, but they work for a big project or in a 90-minute time block. We walk through those later, but basically it's about bringing awareness to recentering, revisioning, redeciding, and re anchoring yourself and then taking the next step.
And there are a few next-level keys to “feminine followthrough” that I will teach in Feminine Productivity. If you want to learn more and do a deep dive into how to plan your day, make sure to come to our upcoming workshop!
In the feminine model of planning, we have to be willing to trust our hearts and guts and intuitions and future selves and make a plan to fulfill what they are dishing out. We need to get real about time and take the steps. When we practice this again and again, new sychronicities open up. EVERYTHING changes.
